It’s been another busy and fun-filled fortnight at Macquarie Island with two more birthdays, the inter-station darts competition, and the 2017 48–hour Antarctic Film Festival.

Birthdays

The end of July-start of August saw us celebrate another two station birthdays, with everyone once again being spoilt by the culinary delights of our awesome chef Nick Baker. July 27 saw us celebrate building services supervisor (BSS) Dave Brett’s birthday, with an epic seafood feast followed a clown themed party. The following weekend, we celebrated Ranger Andrea Turbett’s birthday, which featured two stunning birthday cakes.

Darts

With the start of August, the annual inter-station darts competition has commenced. The annual event sees the four Australian Antarctic stations (Casey, Davis, Mawson, and Macquarie Island) compete against each other in a round-robin pairs format.

Macca’s first match of the series was a ‘Day/Nighter’ against Mawson station, kicking off at 8pm Macca time (3pm Mawson time). The Macca team of Nick (Chef), Wayne (Plumber), Emry (BoM), Andrea (Ranger), Dave (BSS), and Matt (Bom), fought hard over two hours, but were eventually beaten by Mawson 2-1. With upcoming matches against Casey and Davis, the team has been hitting the practice board every night and is looking forward to some quality match-ups.

Antarctic 48-Hour Film Festival

From the 4th to the 6th of August, the station competed in the 2017 Winter International Film Festival (WIFFA). The Festival is a longhand tradition across the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic community. Each research station is given the challenge of creating, filming, and editing a five-minute film within a 48-hour time period, with each film needing to contain five ‘must-have’ items as chosen by other stations. This year the five key items were:

1. A line of dialogue: 'Do you think you could light my fire?'

2. Action: Karate chop

3. Object: Sausage

4. Sound: Sounds of popcorn popping

5. Character: A blind barman

After receiving the five ‘must-haves’ late on Friday afternoon, the station set about planning, filming, and editing our masterpiece. Thanks to the creative directing genius of Matt ‘Tarantino’ Westbury, along with his stellar production team of Melem (Albatross Researchers Mel Wells and Emily Mowat), we produced an epic Macquarie Island-centric parody of the classic western movie ‘The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly’ - We hope you enjoy it: ’Some Good, Some Bad, and Some Ugly’